O mito da igualdade: inquietações antropológicas sobre a Lei de Alienação Parental no Brasil

Abstract

This article draws on ongoing anthropological research into the uses, meanings, and disputes surrounding the Parental Alienation Law (Law No. 12.318/2010) in Brazil. It proposes a critical reading of its articulation with discourses of protection and the forms of production of truth and justice. Combining perspectives from the anthropology of reproduction, the state, and gender, based on a bibliographic review and ongoing ethnographic incursions, the work analyzes how the law has been mobilized in legal disputes involving child custody, revealing tensions between conjugality and parenthood. Denounced by activists, lawyers, psychologists, organizations and councils as a threat to the rights of women and children, the law is accused of legitimizing forms of institutional violence by silencing reports of abuse under the pretext of defending family coexistence and the “best interests of the child”, based on the supposed equality of the parental pair. The gender asymmetry in this context is evidenced by the reading of the Parental Alienation Law as a patriarchal response to the achievement of rights for women, such as the Maria da Penha Law. The analysis seeks to understand the normalizing effects of the Parental Alienation Law and proposes the notion of reproductive justice as an interpretative key to dispute the meanings of motherhood, fatherhood, family, and care. The law operates as a gender and control device by transforming motherhood into a field of moral, legal, and political dispute. The article contributes to the consolidation of a critical anthropological perspective on the conflicts involving reproductive politics in Brazil, making visible the meanings that permeate the public debate on the maintenance or repeal of the law. In this sense, different meanings of equality and the very recognition of gender asymmetry are in dispute as a challenge to the legal management of conflicts and intra-family violence.